A fixation device is commonly used by the medical profession to provide correct settings for bones that have become injured or malformed either due to illness or injury. Typically, a surgeon operates on the patient to expose the damaged bone or structure such as a hip joint or spinal column, perform the necessary corrective surgery and install a traditional fixation device using standard components that need to be adjusted once attached to the patient. These traditional devices are difficult if not impossible to customize for individual patients and individual medical conditions prior to surgery.
A need has arisen for a new method and apparatus for making customized fixation devices that would be individualized for each patient and each medical condition being treated prior to the actual surgery. Such a device would dramatically shorten the amount of time necessary for operating on the patient as well as provide a better, more individualized, fixation device to particularly account for the abnormality being treated.
One approach to this problem has been to take data derived from a Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) scan and using that data in combination with data derived from a Computer Aided Design (CAD) system to customize a hip prosthesis. In this prior art device, a CAT scan of the patient's hip is used in connection with the CAD system to mill by hand a standard stem that matches the inner canal of the patient's hip. While this approach has achieved some of the aforementioned advantages, it has significant disadvantages making it generally unacceptable to widespread use outside the area of hip prosthesis.